BRB, gotta wash out my eyes with bleach now.

There will always be someone requesting the weirdest Windows features.

This is the UI of my nightmares

I use rofi (on my machine with dmenu theme) and after some digging I found this: https://github.com/Dartegnian/rofi-metro You may use this on any distro as there are very few dependencies to run this simple launcher :)

I’m coming from a place of complete ignorance on this, but I’m guessing this would be a straightforward gnome extension. The app menu is almost this already

I don’t have a particular DE in my mind that offers this feature out of the box, but if one offers that, then it’s KDE. Search for it in their application starter menu section, there’s one for sure!

Question is: why do you want that?
It’s wrong to judge one for their taste, that’s sure. To be fair, I even liked the W8 menu when it came out.

The problem with it is, that it creates a “dive in”-effect, similar to when you enter a room and then forget what you wanted in the first place.

I personally would recommend you Vanilla Gnome. It has a similar, simplistic design language and the overview creates the opposite effect. Instead of the “enter a new room”, the activity overview disconnects you from your current task and makes task switching easier while not forgetting what you originally wanted.

Are there any other reasons for why you chose the menu?

You could hack something together with KDE widgets (plasmoids I think?), creating an array of app launchers on your desktop.

It’d be a completly manual way of doing it though, so up to you if you think it’s worth it.

There is a KDE Plasma widget that adds a metroUI style tiled launch screen to the desktop… Though I don’t remember it’s name atm